“I don’t understand,” Moira said. “If Wiz is talking to us ‘real-time,’ as you say, why is it harder to track him in chat than when he sends us messages?”
Moira was sitting with the programmers in their workroom. She tried to spend as little time there as possible to let them work in peace. So she only popped in a dozen or so times a day. Jerry had rigged a panic button to summon her and any of them who weren’t in the room if they got a message from Wiz, but Moira still checked constantly.
Danny shook his head and compressed his lips into a tight line. “It shouldn’t be, but Wiz got real clever. He’s using a program called IRC to chat and he’s connecting through the freenet in Cleveland. Dialing in on the phone system to one of the freenet’s numbers and using their IRC facility.”
“But you said if you could get back to the telephones in your world you could easily find where he is tapping in from our world,” Moira said plaintively.
“And normally we could. We can use the software built into a digital phone switch to let us trace someone’s connection point in about three seconds.” He made a face. “Problem is, Wiz knows it too.”
Jerry nodded. “It’s as if he’s deliberately making this as hard as he can.”
Moira’s mouth quirked up in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Most likely he is. If the geas commands that he keep his location secret then he will bend all his efforts to that end. He cannot deliberately go against the geas.”
“Anyway,” Danny said, “Wiz always said he didn’t know much about how we tapped into the phone system.”
“That’s because he didn’t want to know,” Jerry said. “The whole thing’s blatantly illegal.”
“So what are they going to do? Send the FBI to arrest us?”
“His conscience bothered him.”
Danny shrugged. “Anyway, he must have understood more than I thought. See, we can use the automatic trace facility in the switch to find him, provided he’s coming in through a digital switch. Digital phone switches are just about universal in the United States so I took that as a given.”
“And it is not?”
Danny made a face. “His first link is to the local phone company. The next one is into the private phone system of a major oil company, where normal trace facilities don’t go. Okay, we got that one. But the next link is via the oil company’s leased lines to its satellite link to one of its exploration offices in Ulan Bator, Outer Mongolia. Needless to say, that is not a digital switch.”
“Oh,” Moira said in a small voice.
“It gets better. The next link is from the Ulan Bator switch to a switchboard someplace else in Outer Mongolia. We think it’s in a yurt. Anyway, that one is not only not digital, it’s still run by a human operator.” Danny made an even worse face. “Currently we are trying to figure out how to get through that one. Then we’ll see what other surprises he has in store for us.”
“It does not sound hopeful then,” Moira said.
“There’s one more complication you should know about. Even once we slog through all that we will have to run a trace from the switch he is using to his connection point back in this world. That will take a couple or three hours from the time we locate the right switch.
“Needless to say,” Jerry added, “we are still pursuing the e-mail link as well.” He reached out and patted Moira’s hand. “Don’t worry, we’ll find him whether he wants to be found or not.”
“Is this place secure?” the FBI director asked, looking around the conference room deep in the bowels of the FBI building.
“As secure as we can make it,” the staffer at the foot of the table told her. His name was Wilkins and he was in charge of such things.
The director grunted and pulled a package of cigarettes out of her purse.
The room was supposed to be a no-smoking area but no one objected.
She lit up, inhaled and blew smoke out through her nostrils. “Before we get to the regular business we have a non-agenda item.”
Everyone leaned forward expectantly. If it was too sensitive to go on the agenda it was very sensitive indeed.
“Moron Pashley,” the director said, taking obvious relish in mangling the name. “He’s still making trouble.”
Everyone leaned back. Several staffers stared down at the papers before them. One or two looked up at the ceiling, as if hoping to find the answer written there. No one in the room had to be told who Pashley was. He wasn’t at all important in the grand scheme of things, but since the call from the head of No Such Agency he had become a major burr under the director’s saddle. As a result, the top echelon of the FBI spent an inordinate amount of time trying to keep him discreetly under control.
“How?” asked Paul J. Rutherford, her special assistant and troubleshooter.
“He’s stuck out in the middle of the desert.”
“He’s less than two hours from a major airport and he wants to go investigate this new hacker case personally.”
“That could be tricky,” said James Hampton, her legal adviser. “We’d need a very good reason to forbid him.”
“If we can’t forbid him we can sure as hell transfer him,” the director said. “Send him to some place really remote.”
“Well, there is a site in Antarctica,” Rutherford said. The director brightened visibly.
“Won’t work,” Hampton put in. “It’s outside the U.S. and we’re legally forbidden to operate anywhere else.”
“Well, what can we find inside the U.S.?” The director asked. “There’s gotta be a deep, dark hole somewhere we can stick this clown.”
“Just any hole won’t do,” Hampton reminded her. “It’s got to have a major computer link to the outside world so we can maintain Pashley is working on computer crime.”
“The Aleutians!” someone further down the table said. “There are a couple of places out on those islands with major computer links and nothing else but fog, seagulls and Kodiak bears.”
The director thought of Pashley meeting a giant bear in the fog. She brightened again.
“Won’t work,” Rutherford said glumly. “Those computers are too important.
If he screws them up we’ve got major problems, national-security-wise.”
“But the Cold War is over,” the director protested. “We’re not worried about the Russians any more.”
“We use them to eavesdrop on the Japanese and Koreans,” Hampton said apologetically.
The director ground out her cigarette and muttered a highly politically incorrect phrase from her childhood. One that used “mother” as an adjective three times.
“All right, this clown wants to go to San Francisco ‘to pursue a hot lead.’ Any suggestions?”
For a long moment no one at the table said anything. Then Hampton voiced the inevitable. “Since it’s a legitimate national security case I don’t think we dare stop him,” he said apologetically.
The director used the phrase again.
Well, Ray Whipple thought, at least I’m getting some time in San Francisco out of this. Ray liked San Francisco, especially when it was summer in the desert, but he wasn’t looking forward to this trip at all.
He looked around the office to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything-and to keep his mind off what the rest of today was going to be like.
For one thing it involved a ninety-minute automobile ride with Myron Pashley, followed by a wait in an airport and a two-hour flight with the man. That was a lot more than the Recommended Daily Allowance of Pashley and damn close to the LD-50.
Which was the other thing. The man would not shut up about this system breaker he was tracking. Since most of what he had to say was palpable nonsense and he seemed utterly immune to anything he didn’t want to hear, his chatter was like fingernails on a blackboard to the astronomer. Ray was taking his Walkman and a selection of his favorite Bach tapes in the hope he could drown Pashley out. He suspected strongly the FBI agent wouldn’t take the hint.
Look on the bright side, Whipple thought. When we get to Silicon Valley he’s someone else’s problem.
Finally, Ray turned on his vacation demon and logged his terminal off the system. The vacation program would automatically respond to any e-mail messages with an electronic form letter telling the sender he would be gone for a while. He looked around the office for the last time and realized Pashley’s terminal was still active and connected. Idiot! Ray Whipple thought. As a final gesture he turned on the vacation demon on Pashley’s system as well.
Unfortunately Ray was distracted and didn’t think it through. The vacation demon didn’t think at all. It just did what it was programmed to do.
It was mid-morning when Wiz came into his workroom. Since Anna had started working here he was actually able to sleep in most mornings and he enjoyed the sensation immensely.
Just because he slept late didn’t mean others did. Anna was usually up at first light of dawn and even Malkin didn’t often sleep later than he did.
This morning both of them were in his workroom staring at the screen saver he had finished the night before. Anna was standing carefully behind the blue line on the floor, broom in hand, obviously interrupted at her work. She was staring at the display like a child seeing her first Christmas tree. Malkin was just behind her, also watching the ever-changing patterns.
Anna saw him and blushed. “Oh, I’m sorry, My Lord, I didn’t mean to . . .
It’s just that it’s so beautiful.”
“It’s a screen saver,” Wiz told her. “Although there’s really no screen there to save.”
Malkin examined the glowing pattern and grunted. “What does it do?”
“Well, it doesn’t really do anything.” Wiz looked back at the swirl of color. “You know, if they had invented those things back in the sixties when everyone was dropping LSD the intellectual history of the Western World would have been considerably different.”
Malkin grunted again and turned away.
“If you’ll excuse me, My Lord,” Anna said tentatively. “I’ll leave this room until later.” With that she turned and hurried out.
Wiz watched her go and shook his head. He was no more immune to physical beauty than most men, but like a lot of men he rated other things higher than looks when it came to female attractiveness. Intelligence, for instance-which definitely put Anna out of the running. Besides, the girl’s vulnerability triggered his protective instincts.
And always and above all there was Moira. He sighed at the thought and set to work.
As usual, the first thing Wiz did was to check his mail.
The very first message was from a net id he didn’t recognize. Spam or junk mail? he thought as he called it up.
Special Agent Myron Pashley will be out of the office and unavailable for
the next two weeks. Please forward any urgent messages to [email protected]
Myron Pashley,
Special Agent, FBI
Wiz went cold. They were on to him! Someone must have found his mailboxes on the broken system and called in the Feds. He recognized the form of the message as a vacation demon. It was just sheer blind luck that the FBI agent who had been getting copies of his messages had gone on vacation and hadn’t bothered to exclude his drop from the demon’s reply list.
Wiz slammed his hand to his forehead and damned himself as an utter idiot. He had been stupid to use that mailbox setup for so long! It was only a matter of time before someone traced him back, found the cutout and caught him.
But in spite of the danger he needed that e-mail link to the Wizard’s Keep. He’d have to come up with something to make it secure from snoopers in both worlds.
System breaking had never been Wiz’s idea of hacking. Danny could probably have come up with a much more sophisticated way of hiding while using the net. But you can’t become intimately familiar with systems without learning things that are useful in less-than-legal ways.
Wiz thought hard for a couple of minutes and then he smiled. Yeah, there was a way. Something that would be just about untraceable unless they figured out the trick-and drive them nuts if they tried to trace it.
A few minutes work at the keyboard and a net of purple and green lines flashed into being above his work table. Several more key clicks and a few of the intersections burned fiery red. Wiz looked at the glowing orange letters next to the red points of light. Each red dot indicated a computer on the Internet that doubled as a router. Not bad. The only question is which one to use?
“Yes!” he whispered. Even Jerry would never think that the system might be lying to him. If he was careful, they’d never have any reason to suspect at the Wizard’s Keep.
That first line of defense would be tough, but it was simple enough that he could put it into effect almost immediately. That would buy him some more time while he added extra layers of security behind it.
Wiz bent to the magical workstation with a will, his fingers flying over the keys. Just a few more hours, he thought. Give me just a few hours and I’ll be damn near invulnerable.
Joshua Weinberg felt like hell. His throat was raw, his cough was worse and he felt like someone was sitting on his chest even when he was standing up. If he hadn’t had a damn good reason to come in this morning he would have stayed home in bed, maybe even called the doctor the way Dorothy had been nagging him to do.
But as head of the Silicon Valley office of the FBI, he had responsibilities. Just now he was standing next to one of them.
“It’s an honor to have you, Agent Pashley,” he said as he led his guest into the main office. He said it loudly enough to set off another coughing fit, but he was sure at least some of the agents in the bull pen heard him.
Privately he was much less impressed. The guy was certainly living up to his advance billing. But as he introduced him to his other agents Weinberg was careful not to betray by so much as the twitch of a muscle that Myron Pashley was anything other than an out-of-town expert on computer crime.
Weinberg knew all about Pashley. He had gotten a personal telephone call from the director of the FBI explaining about Pashley at some length. In fact she had called him at home at 4 A.M. to make sure the call didn’t appear on the office phone logs.
Cooperate. Treat him like he knows what he’s doing. And watch him every minute.
As soon as Bill Janovsky, his second-in-command, got back he’d take him aside and explain about their guest and how he was to be handled. Just now Janovsky was up in San Francisco conferring with the U.S. Attorney about a technology transfer case. Their talk would have to wait until this afternoon.
Weinberg wished devoutly he was still chasing Soviet agents around the semiconductor plants. He felt like hell.
In the event, Weinberg didn’t get to talk to Janovsky that day. Janovsky was delayed in San Francisco until after 5 P.M. and Weinberg felt so awful he went home sick before Janovsky got back. He felt worse the next morning and stayed home all that day and the next day. By Thursday his wife took him to the doctor and the doctor called an ambulance to take him to the hospital.
One consequence of Weinberg’s illness was that it took somewhat longer than usual to get things squared away on Pashley’s hacker investigation.
There were a couple of less obvious consequences. For one thing Weinberg hadn’t had a chance to tell Janovsky or anyone else about his conversation with the director. His people had seen their boss acting as if Pashley was a big gun expert so naturally they assumed he was.
For another, no one bothered to tell the director that Weinberg was out of commission. There was no reason why they should, after all, since no one in the office knew about her interest in Pashley.
Ray Whipple could have told them a lot about Pashley, but Whipple had gone off to visit some colleagues at Cal Berkeley’s Leuschner Observatory to get a first-hand look at some anomalous data collected by the Kuiper Airborne Observatory. Pashley had assured him he would call him when needed and Whipple figured the FBI could do a better job of restraining Pashley than he could.
The net result was that Clueless Pashley was loose in Silicon Valley with the full force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation behind him.